Saturday, July 14, 2012

Obama Care and Us

Even as controversy continues among us over the Reproductive
Health Bill, a similar and more wide ranging controversy goes on in the United
States.An important aspect of the
US debate is about the implications of freedom of religion.And since the doctrine on religious
liberty was brought to the Philippines from the United States, it might profit
us to ponder what is happening and what has happened in the United States.The recent Supreme Court decision National Federation of Independent Business
v. Sebelius covered just part of the total controversy.The fight of the US Bishops is over an
area wider than what had been decided so far.

In a document entitled Our
First, Most Cherished Liberty the US Bishops summed up some of the
government policies they are fighting against thus:

1. “HHS mandate for
contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. . . .In an unprecedented way, the federal
government will both force religious
institutions to facilitate and fund a product contrary to their own moral
teaching and purport to define which religious institutions are "religious
enough" to merit protection of their religious liberty. These features
of the "preventive services" mandate amount to an unjust law. As
Archbishop-designate William Lori of Baltimore, Chairman of the Ad Hoc
Committee for Religious Liberty, testified to Congress: ‘This is not a matter
of whether contraception may be prohibited by the government. This is not even
a matter of whether contraception may be supported by the government. Instead,
it is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by
the government to provide coverage for contraception or sterilization, even if
that violates their religious beliefs.’”

2. “State immigration laws.
Several states have recently passed laws that forbid what the government deems
"harboring" of undocumented immigrants—and what the Church deems
Christian charity and pastoral care to those immigrants. Perhaps the most
egregious of these is in Alabama, where the Catholic bishops, in cooperation
with the Episcopal and Methodist bishops of Alabama, filed suit against the
law.”

3. “Altering Church
structure and governance. In 2009, the Judiciary Committee of the
Connecticut Legislature proposed a bill that would have forced Catholic
parishes to be restructured according to a congregational model, recalling the
trusteeism controversy of the early nineteenth century, and prefiguring the
federal government's attempts to redefine for the Church "religious
minister" and "religious employer" in the years since.”

4. “Christian students on
campus. In its over-100-year history, the University of California Hastings
College of Law has denied student organization status to only one group, the
Christian Legal Society, because it required its leaders to be Christian and to
abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage.”

5. “Catholic foster care
and adoption services. Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and
the state of Illinois have driven local Catholic Charities out of the business
of providing adoption or foster care services—by revoking their licenses, by
ending their government contracts, or both—because those Charities refused to
place children with same-sex couples or unmarried opposite-sex couples who
cohabit.”

6. “Discrimination against
small church congregations. New York City enacted a rule that barred the
Bronx Household of Faith and sixty other churches from renting public schools
on weekends for worship services even though non-religious groups could rent
the same schools for scores of other uses. While this would not frequently
affect Catholic parishes, which generally own their own buildings, it would be
devastating to many smaller congregations. It is a simple case of discrimination
against religious believers.”

7. “Discrimination against
Catholic humanitarian services. Notwithstanding years of excellent
performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Migration and
Refugee Services in administering contract services for victims of human
trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to
require us to provide or refer for contraceptive and abortion services in
violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified
from a government contract based on religious belief, and they do not somehow
lose their religious identity or liberty upon entering such contracts. And yet
a federal court in Massachusetts, turning religious liberty on its head, has
since declared that such a disqualification is required by the First
Amendment—that the government somehow violates religious liberty by allowing
Catholic organizations to participate in contracts in a manner consistent with
their beliefs on contraception and abortion.”

Most relevant to the controversy among us on the RH Bill is what
the Bishops cite as HHS mandate for
contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.The others are not yet a live issue
among us.But when one considers
that a member of Congress has already thought up the idea of banning religious
objects in government offices, I would not be surprised if other legislators
should think up other religion related bills.

Religious freedom came to the Philippines as constitutional law
with the arrival of American occupation.Freedom of religion firmly implanted in our country is not just the
right to choose what to believe internally.It also includes the right not to be forced to act against
one’s belief and the right to act according to one’s belief.We should be vigilant against
incursions against these rights.

1 comment:

As always the legislators are going beyond themselves, we do school incursions in Melbourne and find that more and more things are being banned from the classroom. In the end we will end up wiuth a government controlled sea of blandness and boringness for our kids which will also mean a rise in boredom and the very anti-social problems the lawmakers say they want to avoid.